Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition
- She suffered from serious mental illness
- She was not a Washington resident
- No doctor verified if she was terminally ill
- No waiting period was enforced
Her case should disturb both advocates and opponents of medically assisted suicide.Bruenig explains the death scene:
The four-star Hotel deLuxe in Portland, Oregon, features a soaring lobby with a gilded ceiling that drips with chandeliers. Eileen Mihich, a 31-year-old woman from nearby Beaverton, checked in on the afternoon of March 6, 2025. Two days later, a hotel employee named Stephen Jones noticed that Mihich had failed to check out at the appointed time and went to her eighth-floor room to investigate. No one answered, and the room was silent behind the door, so he let himself in. He found Mihich dead on the bed, with purpling skin. Jones immediately called the police, who noted the empty pill bottles at Mihich’s bedside, along with a pamphlet: “Step-by-Step Instructions for Taking Aid in Dying Medications.”Bruenig statess that Mihich had complained about a mysterious abdominal pain and had spoken about assisted suicide but nearly a year after her death, family members are still investigating how Muhich actually obtained an assisted suicide poison drug cocktail to die.
After Mihich died, the investigation indicated that she had no signs of an illness but they had pharmacy receipts for prescription drugs commonly used to end the lives of patients by assisted suicide.
The question was - how did Eileen Mihich obtain a poison drug cocktail used for assisted suicide? Bruenig writes:
For both advocates and opponents of this medically and culturally sanctioned form of suicide, Mihich’s story is a nightmare.Bruinig speaks to members of Mihich's family.
Torina suspects that her niece would still be alive had it been just a little harder for her to secure lethal medication. “She didn’t really want to die, but she felt that she was powerless to create a life worth living. She mentioned that to me on more than one occasion,” Torina told me. Studies show that even minor barriers to suicide, such as selling pills in blister packs and limiting the amount of analgesics that can be sold over the counter, may deter people from ending their life, perhaps because they introduce delays into what can be a rash act. Shortly before her death, Mihich had ordered eye shadow online, which arrived after she was gone. “She was showing signs that she did want to live,” Torina said.Mihich lived with long-term mental illness.
Mihich had been mentally ill for a long time, her relatives said, and she had needed many things that life did not supply her. An only child of negligent parents, Mihich identified with the Roald Dahl character Matilda, a precocious schoolgirl who learns to fend for herself against sometimes cruel adults. Mihich’s parents had screaming fights in front of her, Sarah and Torina recalled, and Mihich alleged that her father, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had raped her when she was a teenager. (Mihich did not pursue the allegations in court, and her father did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Her mother declined to comment.)
After bouncing from foster home to foster home, Mihich was 15 when she fled her last foster parent and arrived on Torina’s doorstep, asking to be taken in. Torina obliged. Mihich’s psychiatrist eventually diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and borderline-personality disorder, the symptoms of which were so severe that she struggled to hold down a job or a home...Further to that Mihich didn't take care of herself, nor did she receive good care
Mihich’s relatives said that she often refused to take the medication prescribed to treat her bipolar disorder, and that she nursed semi-delusional beliefs about her capacity to heal herself. She lived on Social Security Disability Insurance and was occasionally homeless. Mihich sometimes told her family about mysterious pains she felt in her pelvic area...The family then learned that Mihich's suicide drugs were the same poison drug cocktail used for assisted suicide. Bruenig wrote:
...All the while, Mihich repeatedly told her family that her pain was so great, she did not want to live. “She would tell me often that she couldn’t do it anymore,” Torina said. “She was too traumatized and broken” to keep on living.
Once her toxicology report came back, they also knew which medications she had used to kill herself. Many of the drugs prescribed for medical assistance in dying are not commonly thought of as vulnerable to abuse. But when death is a possibility, minor errors can have catastrophic consequences.Bruenig explains how Mihich obtained the lethal poison cocktail.
To understand just how Mihich had secured these medications, Sarah turned to Mihich’s phone. Reviewing her incoming and outgoing calls in the days leading up to her death, Sarah found that Mihich had been in touch with multiple hospice coordinators and loan agencies, as well as a Washington State pharmacist who runs a compounding pharmacy out of a gift shop. Posing as a California family-practice physician under an assumed name, Mihich requested a prescription order form over email, then completed the paperwork and emailed it back—a method of submitting prescriptions that is illegal in Washington and elsewhere, in most cases. She then asked that the pharmacist coordinate via text with her “patient,” and gave her own phone number.Therefore Mihich submitted the prescription for the poison drug cocktail by claiming to be a California physician. The pharmacy didn't check the credentials of the physician, but rather filled the prescription which enabled Mihich to die by lethal drug poison suicide.
Ultimately Mihich was able to carry out her fraud with publicly available information and relative ease. Unlike conventional pharmacies, which sell only FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, compounding pharmacies are able to sell customized formulations that are not FDA tested and approved.
Bruenig explains that Eileen Mihich's cousins submitted a police report, in May 2025 in order to find out how the pharmacy could have filled this fraudulent poison prescription.
The story explains that Mihich's had considered suicide methods. Mihich had considered suicide by not eating and drinking and she had also considered using a gun. They believe that Mihich investigated death by assisted suicide drugs based on an aversion to possible suffering. Assisted suicide is not necessarily pain free.
The next question is how did she find out about how assisted suicide. Bruenig writes:
What we do know is that Mihich found a network of support in her pursuit of a medically assisted death. Her relatives discovered a message on her phone left by a representative of a naturopathic health company called Temple Natural Health, who explained that she had found “a way forward” after discussing Mihich’s case with a hospice-care organization called A Sacred Passing. The message did not include details, and the company did not respond to requests for comment. A representative of A Sacred Passing confirmed that the organization had responded to Mihich’s request for help in seeking medical assistance in dying with “a list of things to do” to get legal medical support—“the ways to reach out and locations to call.” The representative added that she stayed on the phone with Mihich because she sensed that the caller was struggling and needed someone to talk to, but that she didn’t think Mihich would qualify for a medically assisted death.After publishing the video of Eileen Mihich's story, a representative from Sacred Passing contacted the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and assured us that they did not facilitate the death of Eileen Mihich.
In response to the legal loopholes that resulted in Mihich's death, family members contacted Aging with Dignity a nonprofit that advocates against the practice and offers resources to people facing end-of-life problems. This group has worked with Sarah and Torina to create a video about Mihich that helps share her story. (Link to the video about Eileen Mihich).
Bruenig explains the concern:
Bruenig ends her article by stating that Americans may take comfort that Mihich's suicide death is technically illegal in every state that has legalized assisted suicide, but she questions whether this story is a sign that the current laws are not working and that, once legal, it is impossible to keep assisted suicide narrow in scope. She then states:
Bruenig explains the concern:
Mihich’s method of suicide was clearly illegal in Oregon, Washington, and elsewhere in the United States, where medical assistance in death is available only to adult patients who are terminally ill, have six months or less to live, and are mentally capable of making their own health-care decisions. But her ability to access fatal drugs is concerning, as the spread of laws allowing medical assistance in dying makes it likely that incidents like this will happen again.Bruenig discusses issues related to assisted suicide for mental illness, as is already legal in the Netherlands and Belgium and is scheduled to begin in Canada in March 2027.
Bruenig ends her article by stating that Americans may take comfort that Mihich's suicide death is technically illegal in every state that has legalized assisted suicide, but she questions whether this story is a sign that the current laws are not working and that, once legal, it is impossible to keep assisted suicide narrow in scope. She then states:
For some, Mihich’s story offers a salient lesson about the importance of greater oversight and tighter regulation of lethal drugs. Others may see in Mihich’s suicide a glimpse of things to come.Previous story about Eileen Mihich's death:
- Eileen fraudulently died by assisted suicide in Washington State (Read).
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